right after i called god, the pressure dropped down. reporter: after falling 30,000 feet in less than 2 1/2 minutes the nose begins to pitch up and the airplane levels out at 9500 feet. the captain used very artful flying to recover the aircraft from the bad situation. unfortunately it was the same pilot who put the airplane in to that situation. reporter: flight 006 is no longer in a nose dive but they are not out of danger. the crew realizes with drag from the landing gear they won t have enough fuel to make it to los angeles. instead they will try to make it to san francisco. they didn t know how much damage was done. certainly in the back of their mind is are the flight controls going to work on approach in to san francisco? questions like that which would unfold as they got closer.
both in magnitude and in duration. the airplane is going to react more violently than at lower altitude, more with the automation. the aero namic is they are approaching a stall. the air speed indications have been invalid for less than 30 seconds and now they are coming back on-line. but in that time the flight has destabilize and the aircraft is rapidly climbing at a rate of 7,000 feet per minute. things fwet confusing quickly. you look, wow, look at all of this air speed i have, but yeah, you have air speed but you have no lift. air flow over the wing is ultimately critical for generating lift and supporting the weight of the airplane. so you can you can pitch the nose of the airplane up, but the airplane will fall out of the sky because the wings are